I REMEMBER WHEN I WAS 14

I remember when I was 14. This was the age when I was sent off to live with my uncle by a mother frustrated by my unquenching homosexuality. (Read my Coming Out Story for the full gist) My uncle had a wife and a son, Duke, who was gay and much better than me at keeping his sexual orientation a secret from his family.

I remember having sex with my then-nineteen-year-old cousin. Mind-blowing sex. He disvirgined me. I remember how good it felt to have him inside me, sliding in and out of my channel, holding me tight against his skin. So tight, I could feel the heat of his skin searing mine.

I remember how surreal it felt. How I welcomed that dull ache inside me when we were done. How I’d clench my ass just to feel that dull throbbing inside me. I remember the magic.

I remember writing it in my journal. There were two of them – gifts from my uncle for my fourteenth birthday. One, I’d turned to a church note. The other, thankfully, was still empty. It became my sex journal.

I remember writing every detail of everything that happened every single time I had sex. I never wrote about the heartbreaks or other things I felt in there. Those were for my regular journal, the one I brought with me from Enugu, the one in whose notes I never used identifying pronouns or names.

There were pages and pages of my entries in the sex journal. Each entry filled with all the warmth and tenderness and mushiness and love I felt – first for my cousin, Duke, and then later for my first boyfriend, Lucky. No sexual experience failed to make its way into the sex journal.

Then, when I was fifteen, some female pastor in my uncle’s church requested for her ten-year-old son, Daberechi, to come to my uncle’s house for the holiday. It was meant to be a two-week stay. He came, and for the first few days, he hung around Duke and I so much that we had to sneak away from the house when he wasn’t alert, just so we could have our privacy at Duke’s boyfriend, Josh’s house. My cousin would be with Josh and I would be wrapped around Lucky.

Maybe if we’d been a little more sensitive to him, he wouldn’t have done what he did. Maybe. Maybe not.

Apparently, during one of our sneak-outs, Daberechi decided to do some work of his own. This brat went through my box, probably through Duke’s too. And at the very bottom of my box, he discovered my journal – the sex journal. He read everything in it and then repacked my box perfectly. (I’ve got to give it to the child, he was good. He was very good. So good that, for all my natural alertness with my stuff, I didn’t detect that he’d gone through them.)

When Duke and I returned later in the day, my heart leaping and ass throbbing from all the loving I’d gotten, I proceeded to my box, to my journal, and wrote down everything that happened that evening. When I was finished, I put it back at the bottom of the box and went about some other random things.

Later that evening, when my uncle’s wife returned from work, Daberechi rushed to join her in the kitchen. Duke had, as usual, gone to play soccer out in the street. Observing Daberechi rush over to my uncle’s wife’s side, I felt something was up, so I decided to sit close to the kitchen.

And I heard him tell her everything. I heard him regale this woman with the details of EVERY SINGLE FUCKING THING I’d written in my journal. Aghast and not waiting to eavesdrop to the end, I rushed to the bedroom I shared with my cousin and checked my box.

Thankfully, my journal was still there. The little fool hadn’t had enough sense to take the evidence with him. I snatched the journal out of the box and replaced it with my regular journal, which incidentally looked the same as the sex journal. Then I darted outside the house to hide my sex journal.

The first place I spotted was the water tank.

Where the strength came from, I would never know. I lifted that half-full tank of water as far up as I could and slid my journal under it, and then set it back down so that the book was hidden out of sight between the bottom of the tank and the blocks it stood on.

Not a moment too soon!

I’d barely gotten back into the house before I heard my aunt’s querulous voice calling me into the kitchen. I took a moment to still my racing heart and then walked in, head held high, feeling as lofty as a queen. I got there to see the gloating smirk on Daberechi’s face and smiled inside. The fool thought he’d gotten me.

With barely restrained anger, my aunt asked me what the nonsense I’d been writing about her son and other people was about. I looked at her like she was on Crystal Meth and asked what she was talking about. She flared up, promising to beat the devil out of me if I didn’t explain why I’d been writing about having sex with men in her house.

Ha!

With a very innocent and pained look, I replied, “Mummy, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I know God has delivered me from that problem and –”

She quickly shut me up, calling me a liar and instructed Daberechi to go and fetch my journal. It was with superhuman effort that I was able to suppress the laughter that bubbled up inside me as I thought about what would happen next. The little fool hurried out of the kitchen and moments later, I heard him rummaging in my room. He soon returned with my journal and handed it over to my aunt. Madam opened it and began to read it out loud.

A few lines in, she stopped and looked up, a confused look on her face.

“Are you sure you brought the right book, Daberechi?” she asked.

He responded in the affirmative and she continued reading. A few lines later, she stopped speaking and simply read silently. A few pages later, she looked up at me. Then she turned her blazing eyes to Daberechi.

“Where is the evil you said you found inside here?”

The boy recoiled from the heat in her eyes.

Inside me, I smiled. Oh, this was good!

“Erm, ma…” he stuttered. “It’s inside there…”

My uncle’s wife is sha a witch. Madam thrust the journal into his hands. With a saccharine-sweet smile, she said, “Then, kindly show me where it is inside there.”

The boy began frantically rifling through the book. He searched everywhere in the book. With each page he turned, his face turned shinier with his sweat. Finally, he looked up and said, “I think I brought the wrong one, ma.”

“Then, go and bring the right one,” Madam commanded.

After a few minutes of ransacking our room, he returned, determined to defend himself. I could have told him, free of charge, to spare himself the trouble.

Before he could start to allege that I’d somehow swapped the journal, Madam pounced on him with the entirety of her overgrown elephant weight. She beat the poor boy so bad. And all the time she was beating him, I didn’t say a word. I knew her too well. When she was tired though not sated, she ordered the boy to kneel down and wait for her husband to come back.

Then she took me out of the kitchen.

I was expecting an apology. Boy, was I disappointed!

Glaring at me, she hissed, “If you ever try to infect my son with your perversion, I will not just throw you out into the streets of Lagos. I will cut off your penis first, then throw you out into the streets.”

At this, I lost my cool. And I shot back, “Maybe if you would learn to actually trust that the God that you’re asking for more children to add to the single one you’ve had for 20 years is able to change me, then you will have the children you want.”

With that, I turned and walked away from her.

Needless to say, my uncle, upon his return, beat Daberechi some more and, after his wife told him what I said to her, he called me and told me to work on my temper better. He said he understood that it was a mixture of anger, sadness and disappointment that made me say what I said. After admonishing me not to be like Daberechi who told lies, because he can’t stand lies, he told me to apologise to his wife. And then, he said he was proud of me. Proud that I had overcome the devil that wanted to derail my glorious destiny. Proud that I was now in right standing with God.

And when he hugged me, I couldn’t help the smile that spread itself across my face. Because it was apparent that he and his wife had no idea how well they had been played by a fifteen-year-old.

The Nigerian Christian is immediately judgmental, their default position is to quote bible scriptures mindlessly when confronted with any issue bothering on the moral without due consideration of the meaning

Being gay in a homophobic clime, gives one a heightened sense of self preservation and cautiousness. At 15 you pulled off this tryst only the rainbow 🌈 god can estimate what you can do now. But for my heart, what about ur cousin and his reaction when you narrated the truth to him.

The funny part of everything is, I have no idea how I did what I did that day.

The happenings of that day were a prime example of ‘trouble brings out the best in us’

😂😂😂😂

As for my cousin, he knew about the journal. I gave it to him to read on the 1 year anniversary of my relationship with his best friend. So, he wasn’t too surprised by it. If anything, the only change Daberechi’s nosiness brought about was us always locking our door if we had to leave the room.

Wow!! I thought i was the only one who wrote down these things in my diary in those times. I used my own made up code though for the fear of it being discovered by my very nosey mum and I know she read it too but couldn’t decipher the code thankfully.

Lol the switching of the diary was a life saver!! Life could have turned out very differently otherwise.

If u can do something like that then, mehn, am afraid of the kinda heist u will be able to pull now. But that guy sef na weyrey, at least he helped u to sharpen ur sense of self preservation. They think being queer is a switch u can turn on and off when u please.
But come to think of it, i tot having sex with one’s cousin is a sin, just saying, am not judging cos i have this cousin who is super hot nd i can’t seem to get my mind off him for the past 3 yrs knowing he is queer but also a family member prevents me from taking any step further.

Sometimes, some people, in the process of their hatred, become ignorant of many things in this world. I heard there are many lesbians who actually settle down with gays, and even have children to cover up their secxuality from the Nigerian public. There are some people who will never blend with the truth; hence the best is to fill them up with lies…
Nice story indeed!

Interesting story. Mitch! I must applaud you for a job well done. Honestly, while I was reading this story I felt like giving that Daberachi a very dirty slap from behind iswear! That boy is just over sabi houseboy.

I’m sure you must read a lot books and watch lots of movies then for you be that smart in devising an effective strategy back then.